Versus Love
by Rider Paladin
Summary: A lone hero finds himself stranded in a universe adjacent to the right of his own, and ends up meeting a zombie-fighting special agent named Jill and a crime-busting spring beauty named Chun-Li. Good and bad, the rest is but silence, and maybe romance.
1. Alloyed

"Versus Love"

Chapter 1: "Alloyed"

Disclaimer: Resident Evil and Street Fighter, and all characters thus related, are the property of Capcom. Lee "Alloy" Williams is not mine, either, but a character created by a friend of mine for the Marvel Universe setting. This story is written largely as a favor to him and an experiment for myself, for which I am not monetarily or otherwise compensated by Capcom or Marvel.

Author's note: This is going to be a Marvel vs. Capcom fic in the sense that it's a Marvel-based OC transplanted into the setting(s) of two of Capcom's most popular franchises. It is going to be something of a pairing fic, too, and a bit lemony here and there, but not at the expense of good storytelling and character building/development. If you must know who Lee Williams/Alloy is, I'll let the story handle that for me, and if that's unsatisfactory, you can ask Cloud Link Zero. If you must know, this fic is a birthday present to him and also a way of saying thanks for The Other Exiles' revitalization, so those of you who wanted to see that fic continued can go thank him. In any case, let's get it on!

* * *

><p>He was dead. He was sure of it. He had to be. A mutual kill like that was <em>not<em> something anybody could walk away from that easily, not with the forces invoked in said mutual kill.

If that was the case, though, why did he feel so sore? He should have felt numb, if anything, not sore . . . and what was this forest he was in? His road to Nirvana? Valhalla? The Elysian Fields? Heaven?

The young man stared up at the night sky, seeing a big bright moon staring back at him through the trees. He also heard howling wolves in the distance, although they didn't sound nearly as distant as he'd thought, or maybe hoped. Slowly rising to his feet, and realizing that he was not as dressed as he'd hoped, the young man looked out into the darkness for whoever, or whatever, his opponent would turn out to be.

He wasn't exactly expecting diseased-looking wolves with fur falling out in clumps that exposed blood-slick muscle to be that opponent. He wasn't expecting them to be so large, either, roughly the size of a dire wolf or something akin to Asgard's literal dog of war Fenrir . . . just a hundred times more sickening and frightful in appearance.

"Well, shit . . ." the young man muttered to himself, almost literally smelling death emanating from the wolf pack. "You boys look hungry. Mind if I feed you something?" His eyes glowed red as armor began to assemble itself around his rag-clad body, metallic cords of dark navy and off-white wrapping around his limbs and torso and crawling over his face.

* * *

><p>In the mansion overlooking the forest in which the strange young man was about to do battle with the deathly wolves, two young women were in dire straits of their own. These two were Interpol agent Chun-Li, who had come in pursuit of the Shadaloo crime lord M. Bison, and Jill Valentine, formerly of S.T.A.R.S. and Raccoon PD, who had come in pursuit of the bioterrorist Albert Wesker, also formerly of S.T.A.R.S. and Umbrella Corp. Both Chun-Li and Jill had been tipped off to the possibility of an alliance between Bison and Wesker, and had worked together to make sure this alliance, whatever it was for, would never come to fruition.<p>

Alas, it had been a trap. Wesker had let the information out through a third party in order to draw out his enemies and lure them to him. He had been hoping for Chris Redfield, as strange as that would sound to anyone else. Of course, Jill Valentine would ultimately lead him to Chris Redfield, so he supposed he could defer that bit of gratification a while longer.

Chun-Li was an unexpected bonus, though, an Interpol agent reputed both for her dogged pursuit of Bison and in the world of street fighting as "The World's Strongest Woman." Through masterful self-control, he kept the smile off his face as he sized her up; with those legs, he supposed that the appellation was understandable, albeit far from accurate in his viewpoint. She would at least be worth a test run with Uroboros, if Jill proved less than viable.

Bison was not bothering to hold back his triumphant smirk as Wesker was. No, the hideously gleeful expression was naked as day on his face, making his glowing eyes beneath the brim of his hat even more forbidding.

"Like bees to honey . . ." he purred sadistically. "You're mine, Chun-Li . . . just like _your father!_ And your friend is going to make a nice Doll, too!"

Wesker cleared his throat and let out a low growl. "_That_ was not part of the deal, Bison."

"What's the matter?" Jill taunted Wesker. "Not so much fun when the knife's in _your_ back, Wesker?"

Wesker just glared at her, his eyes shining an ominous red even with his sunglasses concealing them, while Bison looked unconcerned. "The terms of my and Wesker's alliance won't be mattering to either of you soon enough," Bison remarked. "And you are surrounded, my dears, so be good little girls and surrender."

Indeed, Jill and Chun-Li _were_ surrounded, as glowing red eyes within the darkness could be seen all around them. Stepping out of those shadows were men and women in Shadaloo uniforms, their skin pale and diseased-looking and their eyes shining a hellish crimson. "Like them?" Bison taunted. "This is the combination of my Psycho Drive and Wesker's bioengineering, the first step to creating the ultimate warrior, the ultimate power . . . power that _I_ will control!"

"This is a new low, even for _you,_ Bison," Chun-Li snarled.

"Enough," Bison cut in. "Boys and girls, time to show our guests what you can do."

Immediately, Bison's newly enhanced shock troops lunged for Chun-Li and Jill, only for Jill to shoot one in the head with her Beretta. The bullet crushed itself against the shock troop's forehead but for all its impact failed to penetrate his skull. Beside her, Chun-Li thrust out her hands and shot a Kikoken energy ball at another shock troop, forcing her back some distance but not felling her as easily as Chun-Li would have anticipated.

With nigh-imperceptible speed, Jill's attackers surrounded and struck out at her with punches and kicks of hideous strength, judging by the vibratory shocks created when their blows missed her and struck the ground or the walls. Jill was dodging their attacks to the best of her all-too-human ability and shooting them whenever she could, but they either dodged the bullets or the bullets failed to slow them down by much. She could only hope Chun-Li was having better luck with them than she was.

"Spinning Bird Kick!" Chun-Li called out, doing an upside-down split while spinning rapidly on her hands to deliver a whirling kick with both outstretched legs that hit with the force of a tornado. The kicks struck down pretty much every enhanced Shadaloo trooper in range of her legs, but those same troopers didn't necessarily _stay_ down.

"Very tenacious," Wesker commented amusedly. "This is going to be quite the alliance, and with those two in our hands . . ."

"The world is ours," Bison finished with a triumphant smirk.

When Chun-Li had finished her Spinning Bird Kick and moved back onto her feet, she saw the Shadaloo troopers she had just kicked to the ground standing up as though her attack had been nothing more than love taps. Their eyes burning an even more lurid scarlet, they attacked Chun-Li again with even greater vigor, with inhuman speed and strength challenging her own. This time, Chun-Li attacked one of the troopers with her Hundred-Strike Kick, pummeling him with what literally amounted to a hundred rapid-fire kicks, the last one throwing him into the closest wall.

Jill shot another Shadaloo trooper, only for the trooper to barely react to the bullet crushed against her temple. Instead, with a sinister crack of her neck, she lunged for Jill with the kind of speed that would have otherwise been mistaken for teleportation, going for her jugular. Jill attempted to shoot down her attacker, but her attacker was too quick and had her pinned to the wall by her throat.

Chun-Li hit more Shadaloo troopers with a stronger Kikoken blast, but it barely fazed them, as they moved to swarm her – only to be struck down by a cutting wind from out of nowhere. Chun-Li looked up in surprise at her salvation . . . and at the armored swordfighter that had been responsible, just before he vanished like a ghost.

Despite her lack of oxygen, Jill had the presence of mind to place her gun at her strangler's temple and fire point-blank . . . which did little but destroy her gun from the backfire and injure her hand. Fortunately for her, she didn't have to worry about being choked to death much longer, as her attacker had been cut down in the instant her gun had backfired. Nearly collapsing to her knees, but staying on her feet and rubbing her throat, Jill looked up at her savior, startled at the sight of him.

"One of yours, Albert?" Bison asked.

"No," Wesker answered coldly at the sight of the interloper, a man in sleek, almost liquid navy-and-silver armor. His gauntlets were silver with scalloped cuffs, and his shoulder armor was similarly colored and segmented. The main body of his armor was colored navy, only with four luminescent circular panels framing his chest and ribcage. His helmet was also navy-colored, but with a silver faceplate with a V-shaped indent at the top and a split visor designed as a pair of narrow glowing red slits that widened slightly at each end to resemble eyes. A pair of metallic sheaths rested on his back, and a matching pair of O-katana rested in his hands.

* * *

><p>"Interesting party," the armored man remarked, his voice modulated by his mask. "Don't mind me crashing it."<p>

More Psycho-Uroboros-enhanced Shadaloo troops began to emerge from the shadows, surrounding the interloper. "Whoever you are, it is a fool's errand to come here alone!" Bison declared. "If you'd wished to aid these wenches, you should have come here better prepared, and now you will share their fate!"

"Like I didn't get this spiel enough from the baddies back home," the armored intruder remarked coolly. He raised his swords in a combat position that had one held over his head and pointed forward and the other held with its blade sideways beneath his chest while his legs bent like a coiled spring. The united Interpol and BSAA agents looked at their would-be savior's combat stance curiously, Chun-Li noticing that he was surprisingly well-guarded in that stance.

"What does he think he's doing?" Jill asked.

The armored swordsman's visor slits seemed to narrow even more, if that were possible. "Come on," he taunted.

At Bison's order, the Shadaloo shock troops came down on the man in force, who simply blinked in and out of sight, striking down Bison's troops in between blinks. "He . . . he moves like Wesker," Jill uttered in shock. How the hell was anyone that fast without being subjected to the same kind of viral infections and bio-modifications as the ex-S.T.A.R.S. captain had done to make himself unto what he arrogantly deemed "a living god"?

"He's on our side," Chun-Li cut into her partner's thoughts. "And I'm not letting him have _all_ the fun." Wading into the fray, Chun-Li brutally yet gracefully displaced many of the Shadaloo troops with a powerful Spinning Bird Kick, and Jill picked off several of the scattered troops with incendiary rounds built to deal with the more powerful B.O.W.s.

"**Psycho Crusher!"** Bison's demonic voice roared, charging to strike the armored interloper in the torso with a Psycho-Powered punch. The armored man cried out in pain, his armor bleeding away from his body in wiry tangles of liquid metal circuitry and exposing a scorched torso. Bison intended to strike his advantage with a second Psycho Crusher, only to be blocked by the armored man's O-katana, which turned out to be far stronger than he was anticipating. With a mighty yell, the armored man pushed Bison back with his sword so forcefully that it generated a shockwave from the colliding powers.

As Bison was pushed back, Chun-Li retaliated with a Hundred-Strike Kick, battering him with literally a hundred kicks in the space of mere seconds. On her hundredth kick, she put enough force to send Bison flying backwards, only for the madman to right himself with a forced landing. Just then, Chun-Li heard a gunshot from Jill, who shouted at her, "It's Wesker!"

That warning, sadly, was not enough for Chun-Li to outmaneuver the black-clad schemer's brutal blitz, coming at her so fast he seemed to disappear between seconds. Having downed Chun-Li, Wesker went for Jill, who shot at him seemingly haphazardly but really trying to fire where she anticipated he'd move to evade her bullets. It was really a clever thought, but Wesker was too fast and too smart, as he saw it, to fall for a ploy like that. As he was about to close in on Jill, he found his strike blocked by the flat side of the armored man's O-katana, the armored one looking a little worse for wear despite that his armor had managed to regenerate around his wounded torso.

"You're an interesting one," Wesker remarked, "but not quite enough to hope to beat me."

"The boastful ones go down the hardest," the armored man taunted back, and threw Wesker back with a pulse of kinetic force from his O-katana. As Wesker fell back, the armored man looked past him to see Chun-Li in the throes of battle with M. Bison, who was punishing her with his Psycho-Powered punches while Chun-Li was using all her power to hold her own against him. He turned back to Jill. "She's your partner, right? Think we ought to help?"

That was when Wesker closed in on the armored man. "Worry about yourself, whelp," he snarled as he hit the armored man with a vicious uppercut palm thrust to his masked face, knocking him into the air to tumble haphazardly before crashing to the ground. Jill was about to open fire on Wesker, but Wesker blinked out of the way of her bullets and grabbed her wrists with enough force to make her drop her gun. It didn't exactly stop her from kneeing him in the solar plexus and slamming the full weight of her body into him to try to knock him off-balance; she was made of sterner stuff than to just give in so easily to her worst enemy.

Just as Wesker was about to subdue her, a blade sliced into his back, eliciting a growl of pained anger as the black-clad mastermind whirled upon the new threat. Said threat, the armored man from before, took the opportunity to slash him in the chest with the second O-katana he kept in reserve. Wesker threw Jill aside to focus on the armored man with the twin O-katana, throwing himself into a blitz attack intended to overwhelm his opponent the same way he'd done to Jill and Chun-Li. To his surprise, the armored swordsman was keeping up perfectly with his movements and even countering while moving at the same nigh-imperceptible speed.

With Wesker occupied by the mysterious armored man, Jill turned her attentions to her partner Chun-Li, whom Bison was pushing on the ropes. Chun-Li twisted out of the way while feinting to make it look like a Spinning Bird Kick, leaving Bison open for Jill to open automatic fire on the Shadaloo overlord. Bison let out a roar as blackish-purple energy surged around his body, the aura deflecting Jill's bullets. Of course, it had still served a purpose, namely for the armored man to dodge and leave Wesker to be hit by the ricochets. Wesker's insane speed was based partly on superior perception and prediction of his foes' movements, but against stray bullets or other attacks whose source could not necessarily be determined by his senses, even he would be caught unawares.

Wesker growled furiously as his bullet wounds and sword wounds began to regenerate, albeit slowly. The armored man seized upon the mastermind's weakened condition to press his attack, striking with his swords at such speed that he was creating afterimages. Bison had charged up his Psycho Power and was now ready to finish off Jill and Chun-Li, only for Chun-Li to unleash her Kikosho, a sphere of chi that grew from around her and clashed with Bison's twisted aura before growing enough to suffocate Bison's power.

"What . . . _what is this?_" Bison roared furiously.

"The power of one such as you never overcomes the power of those of true fighting spirit . . . and true fighting spirit comes from the heart – a heart _you don't have!_" Chun-Li retorted before directing the Kikosho sphere to blast Bison to the ground.

Meanwhile, the mysterious armored man was finishing his fight with Wesker, blitzing the shaded mastermind in ways even Wesker could not match. By the end of it, Wesker's shades had been knocked off, exposing his unnaturally glowing red eyes and the catlike slits he had for pupils, and he was generally worse for wear. With a furious growl, he charged the armored swordsman, only for Chun-Li to intercede with a dual Hundred-Strike Kick that went through Wesker's charge and sent him into the air with the last kick. Chun-Li flipped up after him and twisted into a Spinning Bird Kick, supercharged if the tornado her whirling body was creating was anything to go by, that brutally felled the aspiring god, knocking him to the ground with a hard tumble as Chun-Li herself landed gracefully.

"Wonder who those chumps were," the swordsman remarked. "They seemed to think pretty big of themselves."

"Albert Wesker and M. Bison," Chun-Li replied. "Interpol's been after them both for years, even though Wesker is typically in the BSAA's jurisdiction, which is why my partner Jill Valentine is here. She was after Wesker, a terrorist using biochemical engineering to create Bio-Organic Weapons, turning humans and animals into monsters, all in the name of making some kind of superhuman species."

"About sums him up," Jill spat, regarding the prone Wesker with the scorn someone would reserve for a rat.

"What about the Nazi?" the swordsman asked. Catching the odd look both Jill and Chun-Li sent his way, he shrugged. "With that uniform, he was just inviting the comparison."

"He's Dictator M. Bison," Chun-Li explained. "Leader of Shadaloo, a crime syndicate whose tentacles have spread all over the world. He uses an extralegal worldwide street fighting tournament as a tool to recruit strong fighters as his enforcers, winning them over with the promise of money, revenge, or getting to do for a living what they love doing for free – if he doesn't just corrupt them with his Psycho Drive to turn them into loyal minions. He's killed many people, ruined many innocent lives . . . it'll be a snowball's chance in hell before he gets to keep doing it . . ."

"So why don't we just arrest them now?" the swordsman asked. "We have them down for the count. We should take them in while we can."

"And who are you, by the way?" Jill asked. "Not that I mind the help; we'd have been finished without you, but you just came from out of nowhere to bail us out against Wesker and Bison. Just wondering how that happened."

"Wouldn't believe me if I told you," the armored swordsman replied wryly.

Chun-Li gave the armored swordsman a challenging smirk. "I've seen things maybe _you_ wouldn't believe if I told you."

The armored swordsman chuckled slightly. "Point."

* * *

><p>Just then, he noticed Wesker rising to his feet, holding a grenade that was missing its pin. He tossed the grenade into the air and with all the strength he could muster in his injured condition, kicked it right at Jill, Chun-Li, and the armored swordsman. The swordsman drew his O-katana to deflect the exploding grenade, and while the twin swords created an impromptu shield for Jill and Chun-Li, the shockwave from the detonation still sent them all flying.<p>

When they'd recovered their bearings, they found themselves outside the now burning mansion. Jill and Chun-Li were a bit scorched and their clothes were slightly torn, but they were mostly intact. As for the armored swordsman, he was on one knee, holding himself up just barely thanks to one of his O-katana. Both agents looked at him with curiosity, noticing that his armor had changed form somewhat, though in the moonlit darkness, it was hard to determine how exactly it had changed. They wouldn't get a chance to look at it more closely, as the armor now seemed to be unraveling into metallic wires and tendrils that were retracting into his body.

The first thing they could see was the face of a young Japanese man who appeared to be in his late teens, about 19 at the most. He had chin-length black hair that hung in a sweaty mess around his face, and his body had no covering other than rags. It was actually rather embarrassing for Chun-Li and Jill, who were both trying not to make note of how well-toned the young man was. Also embarrassing was that he seemed so young compared to them, and he'd still somehow saved them both from being killed or worse by their arch-nemeses.

The young man looked at the two agents. "You got any transport? My armor's kind of beat right now."

"What's your name?" Chun-Li asked.

"I'm called Alloy," the young man replied. "What about you?"

"Chun-Li, and this is my partner Jill Valentine," Chun-Li replied.

"Alloy?" Jill repeated. "Is that some kind of codename?"

"Yeah," Alloy admitted. "After my armor, it's made of an alien metallic bio-mesh that works by bonding with a living organism and amplifying that organism's abilities exponentially."

"What about the swords?" Chun-Li wondered.

"The bio-metal can also absorb metallic objects into itself and re-forge them even stronger," Alloy replied. "The swords were kind of a family heirloom; figured they wouldn't mind me using them to cut up some bad guys."

"We do have transport," Jill admitted. "Just outside this forest."

"That's good," Alloy responded.

The trio made their way into a black SUV with bulletproofed and dark-tinted windows and an armored chassis. "Sweet ride," Alloy piped up.

"In this kind of business, you can't afford much except the best," Jill admitted wryly. "The rest gets you dead."

Alloy climbed into the backseat of the SUV while Jill hopped into the driver's seat and Chun-Li sat next to her in the passenger seat. "So what's your angle?" Alloy asked Chun-Li.

"My angle?" Chun-Li echoed curiously.

"Yeah, it seemed kind of personal between you and that Bison guy," Alloy remarked.

Chun-Li glowered at Alloy through the rearview mirror. "I'd rather not get into that right now."

"Sure," Alloy conceded. "Didn't mean to step on your toes there. Just wondering."

The drive went on largely in silence, with Alloy contemplating the new world he seemed to have ended up in. "Just a question. Where are we?"

"You don't know?" Jill asked.

"Not really," Alloy confessed. "I was just dropped here. Woke up and found these sick wolves staring at me like a piece of meat. Dealt with them, but they weren't like any wolves I'd ever seen before."

"We're in the Canadian Rockies," Jill replied.

"Canada, huh?" Alloy remarked. "Whoa. Looked a bit like a Weapon X facility there."

"Weapon X?" Chun-Li repeated.

"What's 'Weapon X'?" Jill inquired. "It sounds like something Wesker would have come up with."

"Sorry," Alloy replied. "Just trying to see if this was my world or not. Then again, even if it was, Weapon X was top secret. Nothing people in general would know about."

"You're trying to say you're from another universe?" Jill surmised.

"Yeah, you could say that," Alloy admitted.

* * *

><p>They eventually reached a building that reminded Alloy of the Stark Towers facility that the Avengers had used as a base. Jill drove the armored SUV into an adjacent "basement" parking lot and parked it in what looked like a reserved space. After that, she, Chun-Li, and Alloy got out of the SUV and walked over to the elevator, which Jill opened with a key card before stepping in with Chun-Li and Alloy. Jill pressed the button for the top floor and then the elevator proceeded to ascend rather quickly to the top floor, where it stopped but a minute later.<p>

A minute that felt like an eternity, given the tension Alloy felt at his new surroundings and that Jill and Chun-Li felt at the presence of their impromptu guest . . . who was nearly naked in his rags. Once the elevator door opened, Jill went out first, followed by Chun-Li and Alloy, who had let Chun-Li go first with an insouciant, "Ladies first."

Now the three of them were heading for what Alloy could tell was the War Room, where Alloy nearly had a gun pointed at him. "The hell, man?"

"Who's he?" a tall, well-muscled man in body armor interrogated.

"He calls himself Alloy," Jill replied. "And relax, Chris. He saved us."

Chris inhaled deeply and then holstered his gun again. "Sorry. It's just . . . I worry."

"Like a house husband waiting for his wife to get back from work," a wiry man with a fringe of dark blond hair hanging over his face wryly observed, prompting a dismissive scoff from Chris.

"Where'd you get him from?" inquired a lithe but well-muscled petite blonde woman in a sleeveless green leotard with camouflage paint on her legs and a red beret on her head.

"He just showed up," Chun-Li replied. "And saved us from Wesker and Bison."

"Impressive," the blonde remarked, and Alloy noted a British accent in her tone.

"This guy saved you?" scoffed a well-tanned redhead with her hair tied in a long braid and dressed in a cleavage-baring power suit with a pair of yellow-tinted glasses covering her eyes. "He doesn't look like he could save himself."

"I could show you," Alloy offered. "Suit's recovered by now, I think." Concentrating a moment, liquid metal uncoiled from within his body in the form of wires and tendrils that wrapped around his limbs, torso, and head, reforming into his armor. The dual visor slits flashed scarlet before returning to their customary dim red glow, and Alloy flicked his wrists, letting sword hilts extend from them before they were followed by six-foot katana blades. Once they were done extending, Alloy held the twin swords by their hilts.

"What the hell kind of suit is that?" the tanned redhead exclaimed in astonishment.

"An extraterrestrial hyper-adaptive bio-metallic mesh," Alloy replied simply, as though it were an everyday thing for him . . . which it pretty much was.

Chris looked at Alloy in slight disbelief. "Swords?"

"Swords don't run out of ammo," Alloy answered. "All you have to do is keep them sharp, and they can keep going."

"He kept up with Wesker," Jill explained. "I saw it with my own eyes. He's that fast."

"So what was Wesker up to?" Chris asked, his eyes lit with intensity when Jill brought their archenemy up.

"He and Bison were combining Bison's Psycho Drive with Wesker's viruses to create super-soldiers," Jill replied. "And Bison wanted to turn me into a Doll. Would have done it, too, if it weren't for this guy here. He helped us beat back their super-soldiers."

"I suppose I owe you one, kid," Chris remarked to Alloy.

"No need," Alloy responded. "Wait, what's a Doll?" Almost as soon as he'd asked the question, he noticed the blonde stiffen imperceptibly. At least, it'd be imperceptible to someone whose senses weren't as acute as his while the armor was active . . . or someone who didn't know her that well.

"A Doll is a brainwashed agent of M. Bison," the blonde explained. "And he always picks girls to act as his Dolls."

Alloy gripped his swords a little more tightly, and his visor began to glow a little more intensely. "Sick bastard . . . I should have gutted him."

"Wouldn't make much of a difference," Chun-Li admitted ruefully. "Bison always finds a way to come back when you think you've seen the last of him."

"Sounds like some guys I know back where I come from," Alloy dryly remarked.

"Where you come from?" the blond man repeated.

"Alternate universe," Alloy answered.

That got the leotard-clad blonde, the power-suited redhead, the blond man, and Chris looking at him like he'd just grown another head. "An alternate universe?" the redhead scoffed. "Are you fucking with us?"

"I just showed you my armor," Alloy retorted. "You guys are fighting a couple of megalomaniacs with freaking superpowers that want to take over the world. Is me being from an alternate reality really that hard to swallow?"

"Point," the redhead grumbled after many long seconds of thought.

"So who are the rest of you, anyway?" Alloy wondered.

"Chris Redfield of the BSAA," Chris replied. "Jill's partner."

"Leon S. Kennedy, U.S. secret agent," the fringed blond man replied.

"Cammy White of Delta Red," the blonde offered.

"Crimson Viper of the CIA," the power-suited redhead answered.

"That your codename?" Alloy asked Viper.

"I'm not telling you my real one," Crimson Viper replied.

"Sure, sure, but the name kind of reminds me of a woman I used to tangle with," Alloy confessed wryly. "A nice lady she wasn't." With a breath, he partly disengaged his armor, causing his helmet to unravel into tendrils and wires that retracted into his neck, exposing his face once again.

"You ever gonna tell us how you got here?" Leon asked.

"Wouldn't believe me if I told you, but is there anywhere I can go to catch some Z's?" Alloy inquired. "It's been a long night for me."

"Since you two brought him in, you might as well show him," Crimson Viper offered for Jill and Chun-Li.

"Us?" Jill wondered.

"It would only be fair," Chun-Li conceded. "Except somebody should watch over him so he doesn't wander off on his own and get hurt."

"Thanks for the concern," Alloy remarked with a dry tone and a witty smirk.

"I'll do it," Crimson Viper offered. "Watch him for the night. It'd be a good opportunity to see how his suit measures up to mine if he turns out to be trouble."

Chun-Li and Cammy both looked at Crimson Viper curiously, knowing well enough that the redheaded CIA agent had never been so free with her help before. The thought on both their minds was: _What is she up to?_ In Chun-Li's case, it was followed by a feeling of unease that she was almost afraid to put a proper name to.

"Might as well," Alloy remarked. "Went through this with the Avengers a time or two."

"Avengers?" Leon repeated. "Are they a rock band?"

"They're kind of like you guys . . . except they're dressed a little more colorfully," Alloy replied, prompting sidelong looks from Chun-Li and Cammy. "Of course, you two are pretty colorful, too . . ." Chun-Li let out a soft, mellifluous giggle at the bashful comment from Alloy, while Cammy's face took on a soft pink tint.

"Come on, Romeo," Crimson Viper growled. "Let's get you to bed, and maybe we'll get Leon to let you borrow some of his clothes until you can get some of your own. You guys look about the same size."

"Yeah, sure, get me to bed . . ." Alloy commented. "Is that what you're after?"

Crimson Viper let out an irritable snort as she began leading Alloy to his impromptu sleeping quarters, Chun-Li and Jill following to make sure their new guest didn't rub the stern redhead the wrong way. As they walked the corridors of their base, Jill whispered to Chun-Li, "What do you think he's going to tell us when he's rested?"

"It'll be interesting to hear, whatever it is," Chun-Li replied.

"What have I gotten myself into?" Alloy mumbled to himself. "And how am I gonna get back out?"

* * *

><p>Endnotes: There you have it, part 1 of a Marvel vs. Capcom fic using an original-generation character native to the Marvel Universe. If you have questions about the nature of Alloy's armor, those will receive answers in the next part or two. Think of it as a three-act structure; this chapter is the first act where they meet each other. The next one will be the second act where they get to know each other and form bonds with one another. The third part will be the third act where the plot is more-or-less resolved and they get together, except who will be getting together, exactly, and will Wesker and Bison come back for more trouble? For the answers to those questions and any others you might have, tune in for the next two chapters, which will be written and released in short order.<p> 


	2. Molecular Bondage

"Versus Love"

Chapter 2: "Molecular Bondage"

Disclaimer: Resident Evil belongs to Shinji Mikami and Capcom. Street Fighter also belongs to Capcom. Alloy belongs to Cloud Link Zero and is a Marvel-sourced OC. I make no money whatsoever from this story and am only doing this for fun and as a gift to someone who's become a good friend in my book.

Author's note: Sorry it took me four months to write up a new chapter; I've had a lot going on in my life lately, but I am at the point where I am no longer letting myself be bogged down by it. Thus, I am doing what I do best, which is write fic for the entertainment of my audience. Before I start off, I would like to mention how much I am opposed to 's current purging of M-rated fanfics with adult content.

From a logical standpoint, it wouldn't be that hard to create stronger safeguards and proofs of age to prevent underage readers or account holders from accessing adult content on the site. Furthermore, it is also a violation of the universal right to freedom of expression that so many of us depend on when we go to to write, post, and comment on fanfiction. There _are_ terrible things that can be and have been posted on the site, horrors of perversity and degradation that would appall even the most desensitized connoisseur of hardcore pornography, but that does not excuse mass purges of content based on the actions of a few degenerates. If 's tagline "Unleash your imagination" is to mean anything at all, then these purges cannot be allowed to stand, especially when there seems to be no method or motivation to allow account holders to challenge or contest these purges. It is a betrayal of everything "Unleash your imagination" is supposed to mean and stand for.

And now that I have said my piece, I would like to sincerely thank Cloud Link Zero for his help completing this chapter. This story is his idea, after all, and I am merely helping his vision come to life. In any event, it's time to begin chapter two of "Versus Love." Enjoy the read, everyone!

* * *

><p>The young man who called himself Alloy woke up in a bed he did not recognize, in a room he did not recognize. It took him a few seconds to remember what had happened. That leather-coated psychopath Wesker, the Nazi wannabe M. Bison . . . Jill Valentine and Chun-Li – <em>spring beauty,<em> he idly thought to himself – being brought with them back to their headquarters . . . and falling asleep here, in this room.

Alloy got up from his bed and found a radio next to where he'd been sleeping. Idly, he turned it on and went browsing until he started to hear some hard rock. Then he found the volume and turned it up, as was his custom for fully waking himself up in the morning.

"_Last night I saw that beauty queen / Watched her paint her face on / I wanna be that magazine / That she bases life on / I wanna waste her monthly blood / Wanna get some on my love / Wanna get some gasoline / And burn the house down!"_

"_She's got nothing to say / She's got bills to pay / She's got no one to hate / Except for me . . ."_

As the song played, Alloy began to practice his katas, moving slowly at first and accelerating as his practice continued, moving against an invisible foe as though he were shadowboxing. It wasn't too long that he had to wait for someone to knock on the door, and he heard Chris Redfield shouting from the other side, "You mind turning that down?"

The song finishing anyway, Alloy turned down the volume and went to open the door and confront Chris. "Sorry about that," Alloy said. "It happens to be a waking ritual of mine. Nothing helps you fully wake up like loud noise."

"Loud noise is right," Chris grumbled. "Anyway, when you're ready, kid, get down for breakfast."

"I don't exactly know where you all meet for breakfast," Alloy dryly replied.

Chris sighed, as though he was resisting palming his face in irritation. "Jill will come and show you. Just get ready, all right?"

"Sure," Alloy answered and closed the door to clean himself up. After ten minutes of that, he got dressed in a pair of dark blue jeans, an olive drab T-shirt, a dark blue jean jacket, and a pair of brown combat boots. A minute or so of combing his hair later, and he was ready to go, just as he heard another knock on the door, this one softer than the last. "Hello?"

"It's Jill," the voice on the other end replied, prompting Alloy to open the door.

"Hi," Alloy greeted.

"Sleep all right?" Jill asked.

"Yeah," Alloy replied.

"What was with the music?" she wondered.

"My waking ritual," Alloy answered. "Nothing like some loud rock to shake the cobwebs out of my brain."

"Heh," Jill replied. "You might wanna cut down on that while you're here. We're not exactly soundproofed."

"Sorry," Alloy said, his tone a bit bashful.

"Anyway, Chris sent me to check up on you and bring you down for a more formal meeting with everybody," Jill admitted.

"All right, then," Alloy conceded. "Lead the way."

* * *

><p>Once Alloy and Jill had come down to the meeting room, the first thing out of his mouth was, "Morning. Anybody got decent breakfast around here?"<p>

"We're in a hotel," an imposing blond man in U.S. Army fatigues remarked dryly. "Enough places to find some breakfast if you're really hungry, kid."

"Hmm, good point," Alloy assented. "In the meantime, I'm sure you've got questions. I'll answer them. First, I'd just like to know who Captain Hair Gel is."

"The name's Guile," the blond man, who indeed seemed to have used a lot of gel to get his hair in its unique style, growled. "And I've been brought up to speed on you."

"Nice name," Alloy replied. "And you have? That's nice."

"Guile has worked with Cammy and I on several occasions in the past," Chun-Li replied.

"Hmm, questions," Crimson Viper remarked. "Like where that suit of yours came from, or where _you_ came from, for that matter . . ."

Alloy's suit started to form over his hand, the bio-metallic cords then extending from said hand to hook into the flat-screen TV set. "What is _that?_" Chun-Li asked, starting to put her guard up. Guile also looked rather concerned, to say the least.

"Relax," Alloy replied. "It's another function of the suit; it can bond with not only metal but circuitry as well. You'll see what I'm talking about soon."

Indeed, they did see what he was talking about, the screen lighting up to show something rather horrifying. From the looks of it, it was some kind of metallic substance inexorably creeping over and seeming to consume a human body, being shown from the perspective of the human being engulfed. Everyone present, even the oh-so-hardened Crimson Viper, was aghast at what they were seeing.

"Is that . . . you?" Jill asked.

"Yeah," Alloy replied. "That was me. Just a regular kid named Lee Williams, with no clue what was happening to him and why. Turns out that thing you saw was an alien bio-weapon that had been jettisoned by its creators, and it crashed onto Earth – _my_ Earth, anyway. An organization called S.H.I.E.L.D. found it and planned to study it, but it got interference from HYDRA, a massive terrorist organization with Nazi ties. HYDRA goons attacked the convoy that was supposed to be transferring the bio-armor to the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier, and it got lost in the firefight. That was when it found me, or I found it – we're not sure anymore."

"'We'?" Chris repeated. "You mean it's alive?"

"Yeah," Alloy admitted. "Sapient, too. Don't worry; it has no power to take over my body except under extreme circumstances – like near-death . . . which happens surprisingly often."

"So what did you do after it bonded with you, become a superhero?" Guile asked.

"Pretty much," Alloy replied, and the image on the screen shifted to him fighting alongside various other superheroes. One was a man in metallic red-and-gold armor shooting blasts of force from his armored palms. Another was a large, muscular longhaired blond man in ornate black leather over silver chainmail and carrying a hammer that he used to summon lightning from the sky itself. A third was an incredibly tall green woman in a white-and-purple leotard that stretched almost impossibly tightly over an impossibly curvaceous yet muscular figure.

A fourth was a smaller but no less powerful-looking blonde woman in a skintight black leotard with a red sash tied around her waist and shooting energy blasts from her hands when not using those same hands to pummel her opposition. A fifth was a man in purple armed with naught but a bow and a quiver full of arrows, arrows that struck true every single time and were fired at almost impossible speeds.

A sixth was a tiny woman in yellow-and-black who was using the insect wings on her back to fly into and sabotage the inner workings of the octopus-like machines attacking the city. The seventh was a lithe man in vivid red and blue with spiderlike patterning on the red parts swinging from web-like threads that he also used to clog the moving parts of the machine octopi. All the while, the man in red and blue moved with uncanny agility, slinging quips as fast as he slung his webs.

The eighth was a man who seemed to be a walking American flag, his costume blue with red-and-white vertical stripes wrapped around his waist, an American star on his chest, white sleeves with red gloves, and a winged mask with the letter "A" embroidered on the forehead. This man was the one coordinating the other superheroes' efforts, using a large discus shield with an American star on a black circle in its center with concentric circles of red-and-white spreading forth from that circle to the end of said shield to defend himself. It also seemed to make a good throwing weapon, one that always returned to him like a boomerang.

"Loving your country, I get, but that's just _really_ tacky," was Crimson Viper's dry remark.

"Old-fashioned charm," Alloy remarked. "He was a World War II experiment in creating super-soldiers to fight the Nazis. Supposed to be the first of many, but a saboteur killed the guy who invented the formula, and since that guy was smart enough to realize what his work could be used for, he kept most of it in his head. Even so, Steve Rogers was a rallying symbol for the United States to fight against the Nazis and 'make the world safe for democracy.'"

"Sounds like a real hero," Guile commented.

"Who are the other bozos?" Crimson Viper asked.

Alloy narrowed his eyes in annoyance. "They might look like 'bozos' to you, but each and every one of them was and is a hero in my world and more others than I can count, so show some respect."

Crimson Viper huffed, while Chun-Li sighed. "They meant a lot to you, didn't they?"

"Yes," Alloy confessed softly. "The Avengers were an assembly of the greatest heroes of my world, even if not everybody there was willing to recognize that."

"Go on," Chris grunted.

Chris's blunt tone snapped Alloy out of his depressive funk. "Yeah. The man in the red-and-gold was Iron Man, a.k.a. billionaire genius playboy philanthropist Tony Stark. His company initially specialized in making and selling weapons, most of those weapons being invented by Tony himself. Then he got caught up in a warzone, captured by terrorists who wanted him to build _them_ a weapon. He did it, all right, but they got a lot more than they bargained for, since he created the weapon to _fight_ them . . . and that armor was the exact weapon he made.

"Over the years, he improved on the Iron Man armor, even came up with multiple custom jobs depending on the environment or threat he was going into or up against. He pulled Stark Enterprises out of the weapons biz and started turning toward using his tech to create solutions to the world's problems as opposed to just blowing them away with superior firepower . . . which not a lot of his old allies in the U.S. military or his corporate rivals agreed with. The man had his issues, big alcohol problem, couldn't say no to a beautiful woman to save his life, but he was a good man. . . . One of the best, even, no matter what he'd say about himself."

* * *

><p>A small memory began to play out on the screen. They could see him jumping to the side as what looked to be a small missile just barely missed blasting the area where had had stood on. Transforming his arm into a giant hammer which he had absorbed from Iron Man and taking the trick from all the fights with Sandman, he lashed out at what looked to be a grey, much more heavily armed version of Iron Man.<p>

A blue beam of energy struck the machine as it dodged his swing. Iron Man used the distraction Alloy had provided to collide with the machine and send them sprawling across the open field where they had been fighting.

"_Nobody, I mean NOBODY, steals my tech!"_ they could hear the man shouting as he rushed to catch up with him.

* * *

><p>Crimson Viper looked awestruck by the power of Iron Man's armor. "If you could bring him here . . . I'd like to pick Mr. Stark's mind for that ingenious designs."<p>

"Don't even know how I got here, anyway, and I'm not even sure it's a replicable feat," Alloy dryly commented. "I will let him know that he's got a woman interested in him for his mind and not just his body or his cash."

That earned him a lot of chuckles. "You _were_ looking like one of those lovesick schoolgirls, Viper," Chun-Li remarked between snickers.

"His suit impresses me," Crimson Viper corrected. "That's all."

"The one with the hammer is Thor, Son of Odin, Prince of Asgard, God of Thunder," Alloy replied. "Seriously, he is . . . except he got kicked down to Earth and stuck in a mortal body for being too much of a fight-happy, arrogant jerk. Odin wanted to teach him humility, so he stuck Thor in a human body and life, in which Thor developed compassion for others, to the point that he was eventually allowed to unlock his true identity and power. Of course, he didn't discard his mortal identity immediately, maybe because he was too attached to humanity to leave it so easily. My personal theory, he met a girl."

"_Know this, foul villain, wherever you may hide yourself – the Son of Odin, Prince of Thunder _will _never relent until your wicked stratagems are put to an end!"_ Thor declared inside another small memory as his lightning crashed down upon an otherworldly silver armor that had been already severely weakened by going up against Alloy's armor, the successive assaults leaving it utterly inert.

"Whoa, that guy needs some downers," Crimson Viper remarked. "He's way too hyped for his own good, with that kind of power."

"It's Thor," Alloy commented wryly. "Just how he is. His speeches are kinda epic, sometimes."

"What was that suit you were fighting?" Cammy wondered.

"The Destroyer," Alloy replied. "Ancient Asgardian weapon, usually used whenever somebody needs to get in Thor's face but doesn't have the physical might to do it themselves. Lucky for me, the Alloy's not of this world, either."

"And Ms. Jolly Green Giant?" Chun-Li cut in.

Crimson Viper chuckled. "What's the matter, Chun-Li? Worried that you have a rival for 'Strongest Woman in the World'?"

"Her name is Jennifer Walters," Alloy explained. "In her day job, she's a lawyer. In her off hours, she's six-and-a-half feet and six hundred pounds of raw power. Thank her cousin Bruce Banner; he was doing research on creating a gamma bomb, but a kid named Rick Jones wandered into the test zone and Bruce tried to save him. He did it, but not in time to stop the idiots from making their big test. Shockingly enough, he survived, something in his DNA being unlocked by the excess of gamma radiation, something that turned him into over 7 feet and a half-ton of not only raw power but raw aggression as well.

"He's actually a surprisingly nice guy in both forms, but everybody's first response seems to be attacking the guy and that always turns up the collateral damage to eleven. He's tried to cure himself or find a way to control it over and over, but it never seems to stick for long and it doesn't help that the U.S. military keeps trying to chase him down so they can either contain him or figure out a way to use him. Lucky for us, Jen has more self-control in her Hulk form than he does in his; she just becomes really uninhibited, but she's still a nice lady."

"You forgot to answer what Banner has to do with her becoming She-Hulk," Chris pointed out.

"Blood transfusion," Alloy replied. "From him to her. She enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than he did."

* * *

><p>"<em>Come on, She-Hulk, is that all you can do!"<em> a tall, muscular red-haired woman in a skimpy purple leotard roared at her rival amidst a devastated cityscape.

"_Not even close, 'Skeeter'!"_ She-Hulk shouted back, before beating down her redheaded foe.

"_Nice going,"_ Alloy remarked inside the memory.

"_No sweat,"_ She-Hulk answered cheerily. _"Titania's always good for when I need a workout."_

* * *

><p>"I can see why," Leon muttered, boggling at the memory.<p>

"Lots of collateral damage, though," Guile remarked. "Do superheroes get away with that sort of thing where you come from?"

"Kinda . . ." Alloy admitted. "There's even a company whose main stock in trade is cleaning up after our fights. Damage Control, Inc."

"What about Blondie in the leotard and go-go boots?" Leon asked.

"That's Carol Danvers, an Air Force pilot before she got exposed to a Kree super-weapon that altered her biological structure to give her superpowers comparable to Captain Marvel," Alloy explained. "She took up the name Ms. Marvel, and became one of the Avengers. Lots of stuff happened between then and now, including her taking up a few other names like Binary and Warbird, and then she returned to being Ms. Marvel and to the Avengers. She's quite a fierce woman, and I wouldn't want to get on her bad side even if she is a softie at heart."

"What about fly-girl?" Crimson Viper asked.

"The Wasp, actually," Alloy corrected. "Her real name's Janet van Dyne, a socialite who used her family money to fund her boyfriend Hank Pym's research on reverse-engineering insect traits to help humans. He came up with particles that could be used to shrink a person to the size of an insect, which is a lot better than it sounds when you remember that insects can jump many, many times their height and have good climbing abilities. He also invented a helmet that he could use to communicate with insects by translating his human speech into insect language and vice versa.

"Oh, and another thing about the particles: They can also make someone grow in size, about 60 feet high at the safest extreme for a human heart. He used the stuff on himself and on her, albeit at her request, they became Ant-Man and the Wasp, and it was smooth sailing from there into the Avengers . . . except the guy had serious problems. They eventually broke up because of those problems, and he took up a few new identities while Wasp tried her hand at leading the Avengers . . . and was actually very good at it."

"The one swinging around on those threads and leaping about in that garish red-and-blue costume," Cammy requested.

"Spider-Man," Alloy replied. "You could say he's my mentor, almost a brother to me in some ways. He was the guy that taught me a lesson about the meaning of power, namely that the blessing of power also comes with the burden of using it responsibly. The reason he became a hero was that he learned that lesson the hard way, and he's been doing his best to live up to it ever since, not that it stops _The Daily Bugle_ from calling him a criminal menace and crap like that. He takes it in stride for the most part, though."

* * *

><p>"<em>Game's up, Mysterio!"<em> Spider-Man shouted within another small memory that came up, inside what looked like a South American jungle full of overgrown spiders. He picked up a small rock with a web-line and swung it like a hammer at nothing, only for it to make a small shattering noise that dispelled the jungle. The illusion gave way to the reality of New York City, also revealing that the "rock" he'd smashed into the unseen window was really a hologram-generating cube, which was now broken.

"_Never did have an eye for illusionism, did you, Webs?"_ Mysterio, a man in a purple cape and opaque crystal ball for a helmet, grumbled before being taken down by a blow from Alloy, who used a piece of his armor to keep Mysterio trapped.

* * *

><p>"How did he manage <em>that<em> maneuver?" Jill asked.

"He literally has a sixth sense for that kind of thing," Alloy replied.

"And the guy who thinks he's Robin Hood, but wearing the wrong color?" Crimson Viper quipped.

"Hawkeye," Alloy replied. "Super-skilled archer, taught by a circus of crime, seduced by a Russian agent into fighting Iron Man, eventually reformed and became an Avenger. So did the Russian agent for that matter, goes by the name of Black Widow, she and Hawkeye used to be a thing. He doesn't have actual powers to speak of, but he's a badass with those arrows, so it doesn't really matter that he doesn't have powers."

"Arrows are so outdated," Crimson Viper sighed. "Though he does have nice arms."

"And I thought it was Iron Man that held your interest," Alloy teased.

"A woman's allowed to look," Crimson Viper rejoined.

"I wouldn't want Ryu to meet this Spider-Man," Chun-Li commented. "It wouldn't be a pleasant experience for him."

"Why not?" Alloy asked. "Is he an arachnophobe or something?"

"Yes," Chun-Li replied with a slightly amused chuckle, remembering just how Ryu had developed his fear of spiders.

* * *

><p>The image on the screen then shifted to a chaotic battle between superheroes and super-villains. On the superheroes' side were Iron Man, Spider-Man, Captain America, Thor, a man-shaped green hulk powering through his foes with his fists, and Ms. Marvel. There was also a woman in black, white, and gold with pink-streaked white hair with a harness that she used to generate shapes from what looked like pure sound. Fighting alongside her was a man in a black suit that made him look like a humanoid cat yet carried an air of regal dignity. Three other heroines were the Wasp, a brunette woman in skintight red and yellow with web-like flaps extending from her arms and shooting electric bolts, and a blonde woman in a black-and-white suit with tinted goggles and dual-wielding staves.<p>

Another one among the superheroes was a short, almost feral-looking man in a yellow suit with black sides and yellow claw marks accenting those sides. His face was partially concealed by a yellow mask with black edges that flared out dramatically and white slits over his eyes. Three sharp claws extended from between the knuckles of his hands, which combined with his snarling expression boded poorly for his foe.

Completing the ensemble was a group of four in skintight blue suits, their leader being a man that was currently stretching his body in impossible ways to get at his foes. A blonde woman stood beside the elastic man generating what seemed to be invisible force fields, while a younger blond man engulfed himself in flames that he used to fly and attack his foes. The fourth was another man-shaped hulk, this one looking like he was made entirely of orange rocks, simply overpowering his foes with his fists.

Among the super-villains was a man in green with a five-pointed jagged star seemingly burned into his face and shooting electrical bolts at a rapidly dodging Spider-Man. Another one was a man in an armored suit with laser whips extending from his arms, whips that he lashed out with at an evading Iron Man that countered with blasts from his palms. The Wasp was helping Iron Man fight the laser whip-wielding armored man by using the maneuverability afforded by her small size to distract and disorient him with her "stinger" blasts.

A man in a white suit and death's-head mask fired dual pistols at Captain America, who blocked them with his shield. There was a quartet of thugs, the leader of whom was a purple-masked man in a green jumpsuit armed with a crowbar. Another of the four was an African-American man in green and yellow carrying a wrecking ball and chain. The last two were a blond man in white and red with oversized fists, and a massive man with metal armor seemingly bolted to his shoulders and a domed metal helmet covering his head. All of them were fighting Thor, who was literally whipping up a storm to fend them off with Mjolnir.

A metal-skinned man with a metallic wrecking ball and chain and an Amazonian redhead in a skimpy purple outfit with spikes adorning her sleeves were taking on the man-shaped green hulk. The metal man used his wrecking ball to smash the green hulk while the Amazon opted to get up close and personal and smash him with her bare fists. A blonde in white with a large gold diamond shape taking up her torso was shooting energy blasts at Ms. Marvel and the sound-generating woman, who were both firing back at her.

A man in a green cloak over a metal suit and mask furiously fought against the man in the black cat-suit and the quartet in blue, trading mystic bolts with flames and force blasts. A leather-clad Japanese woman with long metallic claws extending from every finger on her hand fought the man with the claws coming out of his hands. A black-haired woman in tight black pants and a skimpy black top extended what looked like glowing wires to attack the woman in red and yellow and the staves-wielding blonde.

* * *

><p>"<em>Stark!"<em> roared the whip-wielding armored man as he lashed at Iron Man. _"You are dead!"_

"_Not yet, Vanko!"_ Iron Man retorted as he dodged the laser whips.

"_Wonder how She-Hulk's gonna feel when she finds out I beat her favorite cousin into the dirt!"_ the purple-clad Amazon, known from the earlier flash of She-Hulk's memory as Titania, shouted while she clobbered the green hulk.

The hulk merely chuckled unpleasantly. _"Other way around, honey."_

The metal man hammered the green hulk with his wrecking ball. _"That's _my_ wife you're talking smack to, Hulk!"_ he bellowed irately.

"_I'll mount your head on my wall like the animal you are!"_ the leather-clad Japanese woman screamed as she slashed at the masked man in yellow with the claws extending from her fingers.

"_Better than you have tried, Yuriko!"_ the man in yellow retorted as he slashed back with his own claws that had extended from between his knuckles. Both fighters healed uncannily rapidly from the wounds they'd inflicted upon each other, much to the surprise of those viewing Alloy's memories.

"_Stay still and die, you goddamned bug!"_ the bolt-throwing man yelled indignantly as Spider-Man continued to dodge his bolts in a seeming frenzy of high-speed acrobatics.

"_No, thank you!"_ Spider-Man rejoined. _"I'd tell you spiders aren't bugs, but that would go over your head, you being a dropout and all."_

* * *

><p>"So who are the rest of them?" Chris asked.<p>

"The not-so-jolly green giant is the Hulk I was talking about before," Alloy replied. "The woman making actual sound barriers is Songbird, once Screaming Mimi of the Masters of Evil and currently turning her life around for the better. The man in the cat-suit is the Black Panther, ruler of the land of Wakanda and my world's chief source of the extremely rare, and nearly indestructible, metal known as vibranium, which is also what his suit is made of.

"The woman in red is Spider-Woman, no relation to Spider-Man by the way, believe it or not, and a former agent of HYDRA. The man with the claws is Wolverine, he of the short temper – no short jokes, please – and the incredibly long lifespan, not to mention a longtime member of the X-Men. The woman with the staves is Mockingbird, an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hawkeye's wife and partner earlier on."

"What about the Blue Brothers and Sister?" Crimson Viper quipped.

"The Fantastic Four," Alloy replied. "The elastic guy is Reed Richards, a renowned scientist in multiple fields and the inventor of unstable molecules, which are "unstable" in the sense that they are incredibly adaptable to the form and abilities of their wearer. The woman with the force fields is his wife Sue Storm, a.k.a. the Invisible Woman because that's her primary power, to turn herself and whatever she's touching invisible. The hothead – sorry, had to do that – is her little brother Johnny, the Human Torch . . . and you can see why. The guy made out of rocks is Ben Grimm, whose credentials stretch from test pilot to best friend of Reed Richards to one-man demolition crew to superhero."

"What about the other bad guys?" Leon asked.

"The guy shooting electric bolts at Spider-Man is called Electro, a regular loser who got shocked so hard that he should have died but instead got electrical superpowers that he used just to be an even bigger loser than he was before," Alloy explained. "The guy with the laser whips is called Whiplash and he's got it in for Iron Man since it was repurposed Starktech that was used to destroy his village. The nut in the skull mask is called Scourge of the Underworld, who sets himself up like a vigilante doing what the superheroes won't but is usually nothing but a pawn for psychos like Henry Gyrich or the Red Skull or Norman Osborn.

"The Four Stooges are the Wrecking Crew, a bunch of thugs who got their hands on weapons empowered by Norse gods and used them to be even bigger thugs. Bonnie and Clyde with muscles would be the Absorbing Man and Titania, a pair of regular super-thugs who liked each other so much they got married, and Titania has a serious mad-on for She-Hulk, which might be why she was beating on the Hulk here, closest she could get to her. The not-so-ladylike lady in white is Moonstone, who started out by conning a super-villain-turned-mental patient out of his power source and who takes sadistic joy in screwing with people's heads for her own benefit.

"The guy in the cloak and armor is Doctor Doom, dictator of the country of Latveria and archenemy of the Fantastic Four. Why? He blames Reed Richards for his face getting all messed up in a project he should have thought twice about to begin with. Alas, he dodges responsibility for his own actions as well as any regular politician, and he's since dedicated his entire life to screwing over Richards. The woman with blades for fingers is Lady Deathstrike, who really has it in for Wolverine for reasons I'd rather not go into right now. She of the tight pants and energy wire is Skein, who is not quite an archenemy to Spider-Woman though she'd probably like to be."

"And why are you all fighting?" Guile questioned.

"Those super-villains? They're the Sinister Legion," Alloy replied. "All brought together to destroy their enemies – us." He closed his eyes for a moment before going on. "This is where it gets really nasty."

* * *

><p>The image on the screen shifted this time to a luminescent Doctor Doom, crowing over the unconscious frames of defeated heroes and villains alike. <em>"None of you! None of you could grasp my true aim! Nor my true power! And now you will all bow down to Doom – or you will all <em>be_ doomed!_"

"_Shut up . . ."_ growled a familiar voice, and it didn't take long for the viewers to realize that it was Alloy's voice, the image rising in tune with the young man himself struggling to his feet. _"I've heard it all before. The same grandiose crap all you 'big-time super-villains' love spewing. You're still gonna lose. Just like you always do, and then you're gonna go home crying like a bitch . . . just like you always do."_

"_Insolent child!"_ Doctor Doom roared furiously. _"How dare you speak to your superior with such disrespect!"_

"_I don't see anything worth respecting,"_ Memory-Alloy snarled. _"Just another egotistical dickhead who really needs an ass-kicking. And it falls to me, it seems."_

"_Doom, you son of a bitch!"_ was Electro's outraged cry as electrical energy lashed out wildly from him, presumably him juicing up to strike out at Doom. Before the fight could be joined, however, the screen fizzled out in bright light, which everyone watching presumed to be simply because of Electro's power output. When the memory clarified itself again, Doom was glaring furiously at Memory-Alloy, his eyes literally glowing with wrath and Electro just as unconscious as the rest of the heroes and his fellow villains.

"_You dare!"_ the would-be master of the world roared._ "You dare think you can steal the power that is rightfully mine?"_

"_Wasn't yours to begin with,"_ Memory-Alloy retorted as hellish storm clouds covered the sky, an ominous humanoid shadow starting to form inside those clouds. _"And now look what you've done. We're all going to die here . . . unless I stop you."_

"_Even with the Uni-Power, your childish mind is no equal to mine!"_ Doom protested irately. _"Your strength of will is nothing compared to mine! You will fall! Uni-Power or not!"_

"_Let's see about that . . ."_ Memory-Alloy replied with grim resignation, and then the screen fizzled out in bleak whiteness.

* * *

><p>"My memory isn't so clear after that," Alloy admitted. "I remember well enough, though, that Doom stole the power of a cosmic devourer of worlds known as Galactus and the Sinister Legion was just a red herring to keep us distracted from realizing what he was really up to. As you might have seen, Electro attempted to strike back at Doom for screwing him over, but Doom used his power to turn Electro's power back on me. Bastard knew my weakness is that my whole body is essentially a huge lightning rod now thanks to the Alloy. The armor nearly overloaded itself again trying to absorb the output, so the Uni-Power had to intervene to save my life again and help me stop Doom.<p>

"It wasn't my first time with it, actually, but I'd presumed it was a one-time deal. Turns out absorbing Electro's blast caused what remnants of the power I had left inside me to act up to keep me alive and give me a boost against Doom. Even so, it nearly tore me apart from the inside . . . I still held on long enough to finish Doom, and that was when I bit it, too. When we both died, it caused the powers we were using to dissipate, turning Galactus's attention away from Earth, at least for that time – and the next thing I knew, I was in the mountains in just my underwear facing off against some decaying wolves."

One last memory began to play out on the screen.

* * *

><p>Alloy was looking down at the smoking husk that was Doom's armor. They had both kept absorbing the Power Cosmic that the villain had tried to steal from the World Eater itself, but Alloy had outwitted him. Once he thought he absorbed enough energy, he forced all the energy he absorbed into him, essentially overloading the man like he tried to do to him.<p>

"_Failure is beneath Doom!"_ was the last thing he heard the villain cry out before a blast of white knocked Alloy back. Now, the man known as Victor Von Doom was dead, ironically by the power he sought so ardently.

Alloy just shook his head at the scene. _"Told you."_

Just then, he clutched his abdomen as his body convulsed violently. After that intense backlash, all the power Doom released just got sent inside of him. Uni-Power and Cosmic Power, he had them both in spades now, and it was destroying him from the inside out.

The assembled heroes finally began to stand up and noticed that Doom was gone and Alloy was the only one left. Spider-Man began to walk up to him to congratulate him, but he put up his hand to stop him before coughing violently, willing the Alloy back over his face so the blood wouldn't get in the way.

This had gotten everyone's attention and the resident geniuses all swarmed towards him to give him medical attention before he said the one thing that shook them to the core.

"_Guys . . . I can't. I'm a goner. There's too much energy inside of me. I can't contain it all. I have to let it out, draw Galactus away from here. I . . . I'm sorry. Looks like I won't be heading home with you guys."_

With the helmet back on, they couldn't see the grim grin he was giving them, but the proverbial light bulb began to go off in everyone head before they all started turning away slightly. They had all lost someone dear at some point, and now they were all about to lose another friend.

Captain America walked up to him and spoke clearly, his emotions masked. _"Young man. You may not have let us know who you are, but we are all in agreement that it doesn't matter. You took on your mantle to defend others in need. You're defending us now to your dying breath. Please know that for what you did today, you will always be remembered by all of us. Godspeed, Soldier."_

Alloy chuckled a bit as the greatest hero of them all actually saluted him. _"Hey Cap. Last request. Can I give the rallying call?"_ he asked.

The Captain looked at him for a brief second, before smiling. _"Of course. You've more than earned it."_

Alloy stood up straight, despite the intense pain of feeling his body breaking down slowly. He looked one last time at those he called comrades and friends. Some of them were crying, others were sad, some couldn't show any emotion due to masks or helmets preventing that from being seen.

"_It's been a wild ride. See ya later."_

He looked down at his hands before it began to glow an intensely bright white.

"_Avengers . . . ASSEMBLE!" _

With that shout, he leapt off the ground and used the new power inside of him as a makeshift jet pack, flying higher and higher into the sky. He could see the clouds before breaking through them. It wasn't long before he was in space, among the stars.

He didn't stop till he was a good distance away from Earth. Then he called forth every single bit of power inside of him.

"_You wanted this so goddamn badly? THEN FUCKING TAKE IT BACK!"_

He released it all, every single bit of energy that had accumulated inside of him. He became the equivalent of a white supernova, releasing the energy out into space, where it would harmlessly drift away, back to its master a few Galaxies away.

With that, he was done. He had nothing left. He couldn't move, he could barely breathe, let alone think. The backlash from the explosion sent him drifting back towards the Earth and he had a front-row seat to what was normally reserved for astronauts.

"_Beautiful . . ."_ he thought to that mixture of colors for the planet he sacrificed himself for. The screen then went black as he slowly closed his eyes just before entering the atmosphere.

* * *

><p>"Kid . . ." It was at that moment that Guile spoke, and he sounded very earnest. "You're a real hero. I don't say that lightly, but you are. Takes a lot of guts to die not just for your country, but for your entire world."<p>

"Thanks," Alloy responded, slightly embarrassed.

"Why go so far?" Cammy asked.

"Something personal," Alloy replied, and the screen cleared into an image of a massive apartment fire, seen through his memories. The Alloy in the memory had been desperately trying to reach a frightened child trapped in the burning – and collapsing – room.

* * *

><p>"<em>I'm coming!"<em> Memory-Alloy shouted. _"Don't be scared! It'll be ok!"_

The child in the memory hesitantly reached for Memory-Alloy, as the bio-armored hero kept making way to her. Unfortunately, it wasn't in time for them to escape before the apartment collapsed on them entirely, the roof and the ceiling both caving in. Fire and pain were all that registered in the memory, and then darkness . . . darkness that gave way to firefighters desperately pulling the rubble off, trying to find survivors.

"_The girl . . . what happened to her?"_ Memory-Alloy asked.

The lead firefighter looked at Memory-Alloy with unvarnished sadness in his expression. _"She . . . she didn't make it . . ."_

"_What do you mean, she didn't make it?"_ Memory-Alloy exploded, having forgotten the pain in his limbs in a rush of grief-fueled rage.

"_We did all we could!"_ the firefighter protested. _"We're just human! You're supposed to be a superhero! How come _you_ couldn't save her?"_

With that question, the rage inside Memory-Alloy had been snuffed out completely, replaced by terrible self-hatred. _"You're right,"_ the Alloy in the memory muttered. _"You're right . . . how come I couldn't save her?"_

* * *

><p>Crimson Viper did not consider herself a very sentimental woman. She in fact thought herself quite the hard-assed bitch, but when she wasn't on the job, she had a daughter named Lauren that she doted on with every fiber of her being. The thought of not being able to protect her, particularly if one of her enemies came after Lauren to get to her kept her up at night sometimes. Having those fears brought up by Alloy's memory made her grateful for tinted sunglasses; just thinking on it again, and here of all places, was enough to bring tears to her eyes.<p>

Chun-Li, Cammy, and Jill looked at Alloy with undisguised sorrow, and Chris, Leon, and Guile looked rather heartbroken themselves. All of them had all-too-vivid memories of those they couldn't save; Chris and Jill had the entirety of Raccoon City and most of their comrades in S.T.A.R.S., Guile had his old partner Charlie Nash, Chun-Li had her father, Cammy had her fellow Dolls, and Leon had a few partners he'd lost himself. The undisguised grief on Alloy's face as that horrid memory played out on the screen his armor was wired into had made them all remember their old losses.

"That was why," Alloy whispered ruefully. "I wasn't going to let an entire world end up like that little girl. I wasn't going to let the world die like I let that little girl die. I wasn't going to fail the world, my world, the way I failed her . . . if I had to die for that, so be it."

"You're a better man than I gave you credit for," Crimson Viper quietly admitted.

"I think that's a unanimous opinion here," Leon remarked dryly, but with genuine respect in his tone.

"Thanks for the praise, but I'm still hungry," Alloy dryly stated.

"Would someone like to escort this kid to somewhere he can eat?" Guile wondered.

"I'll do it," Jill and Chun-Li said at pretty much the same time, as Alloy withdrew the bio-metal wires from the flat-screen he'd been using to visualize his memories for them.

Cammy chuckled. "Sweet on him, aren't you?" she quietly observed to Chun-Li, a mischievous smirk on her face. "A little young, but you could do worse."

Chun-Li blushed at Cammy's words, but Guile spoke up. "Wouldn't do much harm to have you both go with him. Better security that way."

"Then it's settled," Jill said, turning to Alloy. "I happen to know a place . . ."

"So do I," Chun-Li interceded. "But why don't we let you see them both and then you can decide where you want to eat?"

Alloy let out a brief humored chuckle. "Thanks for the consideration."

* * *

><p>End Notes: All right, so this chapter turned out to be nearly entirely exposition on Alloy's past in the Marvel Universe. All the same, it was necessary to introduce him more fully to the readership here, and now that that's over with, we can get to the good stuff – namely, him making "friends" with Chun-Li and Jill Valentine. Important questions remain, though, like how will the others react to his burgeoning bonds with both of them, how will Alloy himself adjust to his new world, and has everyone heard the last of M. Bison and Albert Wesker? (Last one's rhetorical.) In any event, I will endeavor not to take as long with the third (and presumably final) chapter as I did with this one.<p>

By the way, the song lyrics used here come from "Gasoline" by the band Seether. Since this sort of thing is also being censured by this site, it gives me a bit of personal stake in this ongoing fight against the encroachment on our creative freedoms. All the same, ficcers, I exhort you all to stay strong and never give in!


	3. Burning Chrome

"Versus Love"

Chapter 3: "Burning Chrome"

Disclaimer: Street Fighter and Resident Evil both belong to Capcom and to their initial creators. Alloy is the property of my good friend Cloud Link Zero and an OC from the Marvel Universe. Any characters referenced from Marvel Comics belong to Marvel Comics and not me or Cloud Link Zero. Similarly, characters referenced from Resident Evil and Street Fighter, as well as other Capcom properties, belong to Capcom and neither me nor Cloud Link Zero. This story is written as collaboration between myself and Cloud Link Zero and as a present from me to him.

Author's note: Been a while, hasn't it? A whole year, in fact. In that year, a lot has happened for both Marvel and Capcom. For Capcom, Resident Evil 6 has come out, DmC: Devil May Cry has arrived on game store shelves, Project X Zone will be coming out, and most thrillingly – Darkstalkers are not dead! For Marvel, Avengers Vs. X-Men has come and gone, leaving the setting with mutant numbers greater than ever before and a new Avengers team comprised of both X-Men and veteran Avengers to protect those new mutants and fight for peaceful human-mutant coexistence. Also in Marvel, Spider-Man is dead and yet not dead; specifically, Spider-Man endures, but the man behind his mask is _not_ Peter Parker, yet he is marked by Peter Parker's memory and will. Yeah, 2013's such a trip so far.

Speaking of trips, it's time to usher in the summer of 2013, and I'll do so by finishing up this story, or at least the main body of it. There will be a bonus lemon chapter, but on a different site since I'm not up to chancing the punitive hand of the administrators here. Better safe than sorry, as you never know when something like Critics United or whatever might start up all over again. Beyond that, it is time to see how Alloy adjusts to his new world after the heroic sacrifice detailed in the last chapter, and how his new world adjusts to him, particularly two lovely and gutsy fighters named Chun-Li and Jill Valentine.

Is everyone ready? It's time to spread the word, and the word is . . . Alloy.

* * *

><p>Lee Williams, alias Alloy, was following Jill and Chun-Li on a tour of their hotel base's restaurants. Their first stop was in one that served authentic Chinese food, and Lee decided he might as well try it out, with Chun-Li happy at his choice and Jill sticking around to be near her friend and their new acquaintance. As they ate, Jill started to say, in a hushed tone, "Your world is really strange."<p>

"Really?" Lee asked. Then he chuckled. "I suppose it would be."

"I mean, real gods, real magic . . ." Jill uttered. "I'm still trying to get used to this 'ki-channeling' Chun-Li can do and . . ."

"You fight bioengineered horrors every day, as far as I've been told," Lee remarked with a wry grin.

Jill chuckled. "I deserved that, I guess. Sorry. It's just a lot to get used to, particularly since your friends seem to think nothing of going out in those outfits . . ."

"And what's wrong with their outfits?" Lee teased, raising an eyebrow.

Jill let out another, sheepish chuckle. "They seem more like the kind of outfits you'd wear to a Halloween party, not for saving the world."

Lee chuckled. "Standing out is pretty important in the superhero biz, and Wasp was a fashion designer."

Chun-Li smirked. "You ever see her for tips?"

"Nah . . . not my style," Lee replied. "Besides, my fashion needs were taken care of the moment I bonded with the Alloy."

"So it makes clothing for you, too?" Chun-Li surmised.

"Kind of," Lee admitted. "I just accepted the clothes here because the armor's in Safe Mode right now, meaning it won't be making me any clothes for the time being."

Jill smirked at Lee. "You ever think of hiring yourself out to a fashion designer? Since the Alloy could model any design you wanted and save lots of fabric."

"The practical uses of superpowers," Lee commented with a snicker. "Yeah, Jan tried to convince me once or twice. I wasn't really sold on it."

"Not your style, huh?" Chun-Li echoed with a teasing smirk. "What _is_ your style, anyway?"

"Simple. Practical. Effective," Lee replied. "It's how I dress and how I fight."

"For someone claiming to be such a simple guy, your combat dress is very complicated," Chun-Li rejoined, still smirking teasingly at him.

"Bonding to an extra-dimensional alien suit will do that," Lee admitted. "At least mine's not trying to eat my brain."

Jill blanched at that, bad memories of the undead horrors of Umbrella springing to mind almost immediately. Catching this, Lee put a gentle hand over hers in reassurance. "Sorry. Didn't mean to trip you up."

"It's all right," Jill assured him. "It's just one of those things that stay with you, you know?"

Lee's eyes grew more somber as he related what she'd just said to his own bad memories, one in particular. "Yeah. I get it."

"So what did you mean by your suit not eating your brain?" Chun-Li wondered.

"Little story about my friend Spider-Man," Lee replied. "When he and other superheroes were dragged onto an alien planet to fight a bunch of super-villains for some omnipotent lunatic's idea of a chess match between good and evil, he found what he thought was just some kind of alien cloth that responded to his thoughts, creating clothes for him and producing its own webbing. It bonded with him, and he brought it back to Earth with him once the battle was over. However, it started trying to subvert his mind, taking his body out joy-swinging when he was asleep, and it affected his waking mind for the worse; how'd _you_ react to not getting any real sleep in weeks? It made him angrier, more temperamental and combative, and he even nearly killed some crooks while the suit had him in some kind of fugue state.

"After he realized something was wrong with him, Spidey went to the Fantastic Four, specifically Reed Richards, to figure out what the hell was up with him and his costume. After analyzing a bit of the costume that he'd managed to tear off, Reed revealed that the suit was not just alive, but capable of thought and learning, and it would soon bond so completely with Spider-Man that they'd become effectively one entity, which freaked Spidey out. He tried to separate, but the suit was too attached in more ways than one and refused to let him go until he finally used the ringing bells of a nearby church to force it off him. Of course, that wasn't the end, not by a long shot."

"You mean it came back?" Jill deduced.

"Worse, it found a new host, someone who hated Spider-Man every bit as much as it did, and their combined hate created a monster, a monster named Venom. A monster that had every bit of Spider-Man's powers, but stronger, and knew every last one of his secrets, and one that wouldn't stop until he was dead – or, for the symbiote, back as its host. It's gone on to trade hosts every now and again, but every time, it's still fixated on Spider-Man, like the ex from hell."

Chun-Li shivered. "Sounds like a guy I fought who works for Bison. Vega, stone-cold killer, vainer than a peacock, and obsessed with me because he thinks I'm prettier than him."

Lee's eyes widened. "Wow. This guy sounds bent."

"In more ways than one," Chun-Li replied. "You bringing up Venom reminded me of him."

Lee sighed. "I keep doing that, don't I? Bringing up bad memories for the both of you . . ."

"You didn't know," Chun-Li said. "So don't beat yourself up so much."

"Can't help it," Lee admitted sardonically. "It's what being a superhero boils down to, an overwhelming sense of moral responsibility – and guilt. Can't forget the guilt."

Surprisingly, this drew chortles and giggles from Chun-Li and Jill. "At least you're self-aware," Jill remarked.

"So what about you two?" Lee asked. "We've talked plenty about me, but I'd like to know more about you both. Like, what got you into this in the first place?"

Chun-Li's eyes took on a more steely sheen. "My father was killed by Bison for trying to bring down his Shadaloo syndicate. I spent my life after that training in the martial arts, developing my control over my ki – and when I was old enough, I joined Interpol so I could find Bison and bring him to justice. Along the way, I ended up competing in a street fighting tournament or two, mostly because that was how Bison recruited his fighters and it would lead to him if I kept my nose to the pavement – or put other people's noses there."

Lee chuckled slightly at Chun-Li's quip. "Make any friends?"

"A few," Chun-Li replied with a smile. "You've met a few of them."

Lee smiled back. "Oh, yeah?"

"Cammy, Jill, and Guile, mainly," Chun-Li said. "Viper and I, not so much."

"She does seem like a hardass," Lee remarked.

Chun-Li let out a slight giggle from that. "She's a softie, deep down – she just doesn't want us knowing that."

"I'll bet," Lee commented, before turning to Jill. "What about you, Miss Valentine?"

Jill smirked at Lee. "You're not the first guy to play with my name like that."

"Then I hope you're not too pissed off with me," Lee answered.

Jill smirked and gestured to her face. "Does this look like the face of a pissed-off woman?"

Lee chuckled. "No, but go ahead."

"Chris and I were part of a special police unit in Raccoon City called S.T.A.R.S.," Jill explained. "That was where we met, and we've been pretty close since, especially after what happened in that mansion. We went in to investigate after our Bravo team never made it back from _their_ investigation, and what we found . . . it was hideous. Bio-weaponization experiments run wild throughout the mansion, trying to kill and eat anything they got their hands on, and our captain, Albert Wesker, had sent us in there as guinea pigs. He should have died in there after trying to unleash one of the worst monsters, the Tyrant, on us . . . but he had something in him already, something that brought him back as some kind of superhuman – stronger, faster, tougher, all-around 'better' than the average human, at least in his sick mind."

"What happened after that?" Lee asked.

Jill closed her eyes and drew a breath before continuing. "We tried to get the truth out, but there was a smear campaign launched against us from within the RPD and by the media, calling us liars and lunatics and drug addicts who'd cooked up this insane story as a cover for our own conduct. We were ostracized, scorned, and Umbrella, Wesker's true employer and the effective owner of Raccoon City, covered it all up . . . all the atrocities they'd committed . . .

". . . until the infection spread so thoroughly that the U.S. government had to nuke the city to keep it from reaching the rest of the country. That was when we were able to gather enough evidence, Chris and I and others like us who'd seen the truth about Umbrella for ourselves, to expose their crimes to the world. Umbrella was shut down, but the genie was out of the bottle, so to speak; there were people actually crazy enough to think they could harness these living bio-weapons for their own goals, and each time they nearly destroyed the world. And Wesker, that bastard . . . he's still out there, still experimenting with his weapons and viruses to make himself some kind of new god for his brave new world."

The pain and rage in Jill's voice as she told her story struck a chord with Lee, reminding him of all the criminals and monsters in his own world that had destroyed so many lives and then relied on their status and influence to keep them free and clear of consequences for those actions. Monsters and criminals like Norman Osborn, Wilson Fisk, the Hammers, Victor Von Doom, the Hellfire Club . . . so many who would just destroy and corrupt and ruin everything they touched, and with the law subverted to their advantage, there was nothing that could be done about them without becoming an outlaw oneself.

"Guess we're even," Jill mused, catching Lee's grim expression. "I brought up bad memories for you, too."

Lee snorted ironically. "Yeah, guess we are." He looked at his plate, noticing that it was empty. "Wow. I didn't even notice I was eating."

"Did you like it?" Chun-Li asked, since it had been her idea to come to this restaurant.

"Yeah," Lee replied, before flagging a waitress. "Check, please."

* * *

><p>As Chun-Li, Jill, and Lee returned to the base, Lee gave Jill a glance. "I'm not mad, Jill. It's just . . . what you said reminded me that some things are the same everywhere you go, the same kind of pain, the same kind of corruption, the same kind of . . . evil. No matter where you go, there are just people who are drunk on their own power and want more and more, and they don't care who they hurt because they think everyone else is a bunch of insects compared to them."<p>

"You must have fought a lot of people like that back in your world," Jill mused.

"Yeah," Lee admitted. "And the thing is, since we don't have any real force of law sanctioning our actions, we're technically vigilantes, and _they're_ the ones with the law on their side."

"It's the same with Bison," Chun-Li confessed. "He's a murderer and a sadistic, power-hungry monster, but Shadaloo has its tentacles so deep in nearly every hall of power in this world that the law's almost a sick joke."

"Yeah . . . laws always seem to have a hard time with guys like him," Lee somberly agreed.

As the three reentered the base, they were confronted by a lurking Crimson Viper, whose green eyes were aimed at Lee in a piercingly curious stare behind her yellow-tinted glasses. "It's rude to stare, you know," Lee commented.

"Your suit," Viper responded. "I want to test it against mine. See how well it compares."

"That a challenge?" Lee asked with a raised eyebrow.

"It is," Viper replied bluntly.

"All right," Lee conceded.

"Are you sure?" Chun-Li asked concernedly.

"Yeah, isn't the Alloy still regenerating?" Jill reminded him.

"It's charged up enough for the basics, which is good enough for me right now," Lee replied.

Crimson Viper chuckled amusedly. "You two seem to be falling fast."

Chun-Li aimed a sidelong glare at Crimson Viper, who just kept her confident smirk. "Well, guess I'll have to take him for a test drive first, won't I?"

The tension between the three women in the room was so thick Lee thought he could cut it with his katana, but he refrained from speaking up. Generally a better idea for his long-term health, he'd realized over time, as Viper's green eyes felt like they were burning a hole in him. "You ready to go?" she taunted him.

"Anytime you are," Lee replied with a smirk, masking the nervousness from the way Viper was staring at him.

"Smart boy," Viper remarked, her taunting smirk still in place.

Lee and Viper found themselves facing off in the suite's practice area, while Chris, Guile, Leon, Cammy, Jill, and Chun-Li surrounded them in the background. Viper had changed her outfit, from a three-piece suit with the upper buttons sans neck button undone but the tie still in place to a skintight black suit with armor on the shoulders as well as her midsection and outer thighs and a badge that looked like a yellow star in a black circle on her left breast. The strange suit also had neon red inset piping down the front and pants and around her shoulder guards and down her sleeves. Completing this unique ensemble was a pair of knee-high heeled boots and black gloves with studded cuffs for her forearms and lines of circuitry running up the backs of her hands to the studs on her knuckles.

"That the suit you were talking about?" Lee asked. "You'd fit in quite well back in my world."

Crimson Viper let out a low snort. "We're not in your world, now are we? So let's see your suit."

"Fine," Lee replied, concentrating on forming the Alloy. Within a mere few seconds, writhing liquid metal cords began to slither out from the hidden nodes under his skin, wrapping around his body to manifest the armor. However, it was in a slightly more basic form than the one Jill and Chun-Li had seen the night before, more like a skintight metal body-glove than an armored suit. It retained the features of the suit Jill and Chun-Li were slightly more familiar with, specifically the blue-and-gray coloring and the parallel slits that served as his visor. In all, it looked more like tactical armor with a metallic sheen than a "proper" metal suit. "Hope you're not too disappointed."

"You don't want to see _me_ disappointed," Viper taunted him, smirking, though her eyes gave his armored visage an appreciative onceover. "So don't disappoint me."

"I make no promises," Alloy replied, his voice somewhat distorted by his armor's voice filters.

Were it not for the Alloy's sensors, Lee wouldn't have been able to react in time to Crimson Viper's charge . . . or her lightning-wreathed fist. With a single jump back, he'd launched himself into the air and a backward somersault to evade her attack, only for her to rocket jump after him and land a whirling kick on his side while they were both still in midair and her foot was still wreathed in flames. As Lee began to fall, a simple contortion turned said fall into a somersault that ended with him agilely landing on the ground, right before he jumped back from a lightning-charged diving punch by Crimson Viper.

_Better stay off the ground for a while,_ Lee thought, knowing just how conductive electricity could be after a few rounds with Electro. With a twist of his torso, he moved into an aerial cartwheel, only to end up catching a flaming kick from Crimson Viper's heeled boot. No longer willing to just dodge, Lee grabbed Viper's ankle and twisted around again to ground himself with his free hand while tossing her by her leg. Viper twisted about in midair to regain control of her body and land agilely on the ground, but Lee had charged up to her with a fast strike that forced her to block with both arms crossed, the electrical charge from her gloves throwing off his attack.

Lee jumped back from Crimson Viper, as the cobra-braided fighter pressed her advantage with a flaming roundhouse kick. Lee raised his arm to block her kick and then used her ankle as a fulcrum to lift and twist his own body into a double-footed kick that would put even a professional contortionist to shame. Crimson Viper was certainly surprised, not just at the agility Lee had displayed but also from the force of his kick, as she found herself once again tumbling in midair. Displaying his agility again, Lee flipped into the air right over Crimson Viper just as she was beginning to regain control of her movements, and drop-kicked her to the ground. He landed next to her and whirled into a low spin with his leg out, kicking hers from underneath her just as she was regaining her bearings.

This time, though, Viper twisted herself around for another kick, right at Lee's head, which Lee barely twisted away from in time. As both combatants moved back onto their feet, Viper smirked at him. "Sure your suit's still recharging?" she asked.

Lee smirked back behind his helm. "I knew how to fight long before I got this suit, Viper. How about you? You were getting ready to take the gloves off once I started kicking your ass."

Viper chuckled. "Don't flatter yourself, punk."

Just off the training field, Chris, Jill, Chun-Li, Cammy, Leon, and Guile were staring with shock and awe at the fight they were witnessing. "Shit . . ." Guile uttered. "I knew Viper's suit was powerful, but going head-to-head with a kid that was able to fight Wesker on even ground . . . damn."

"Yeah, she is pretty impressive," Cammy agreed, while unconsciously rubbing herself due to an old ache caused by a previous encounter with Crimson Viper.

"Suit or no suit, kid's a pretty good fighter," Chris remarked. "Going up against Viper like that and holding his own."

"Holding his own?" Jill echoed with a slight snort. "I'd say he's got the upper hand so far."

"Sure you're not just saying that because you like him?" Chris jibed her playfully, prompting an embarrassed flush from his partner. Chun-Li blushed as well, if only because she was having the same thoughts and so Chris's jibe could apply to her, too.

"Your point?" Jill asked.

On the training field, Viper looked at Lee through her yellow glasses. "Where are your swords?"

"Hand-to-hand only," Lee replied. "It wouldn't be fair otherwise."

Viper snorted. "And they say chivalry's dead."

"On life support isn't quite the same as dead," Lee joked back.

"Enough kidding around," Viper declared, and punched the ground, sending a seismic charge through it, knocking Lee off-balance. While he was struggling to regain his bearings, Viper charged up to him and delivered another flaming roundhouse kick, propelling him quite far back. Lee twisted himself around to regain control of his body, only to find Crimson Viper behind him and ready to kick him again almost as soon as he'd landed. Barely dodging her kick, he rolled out of the way and twisted on his hand for a kick to her midsection, only for her to catch him by his ankle. Lee sprung off his hand to kick her with his free leg, forcing her to dodge and thus loosen her grip on his leg, enabling him to twist loose and contort himself for another kick, one that hit its mark this time.

As Crimson Viper stumbled back from his kick, Lee landed and went for the kill with another charge, only to be met with another kick from her. Twisting under her leg, Lee thrust his knee into Crimson Viper's midsection, knocking her back and off-balance. However, she turned it into a handstand on which she spun herself around for a whirling kick that looked more like a tornado that had been lit on fire. Were it not for the protective properties of the Alloy, Lee would have certainly been incinerated by the blazing hurricane that was Viper's kick. With an agile twist of her body, Viper had flipped into the air and was now coming down for a burning drop-kick, one that Lee barely managed to block. Undeterred, she sprung off Lee's forearm and flipped behind him before they both whirled to face each other, Viper to punch him with an electrically charged fist and Lee to block her again.

"Having fun?" Lee taunted her.

"Are you?" Viper retorted before kneeing him in the stomach. As he crumpled from the unexpected force of her strike, Viper slammed her lightning-covered fists into his back and kneed him in his helmeted face before knocking him to the ground with an electrically charged chop.

"Oh, you really are pulling out all the stops, aren't you?" came Lee's somewhat staggered rejoinder.

"You're able to talk, you're not that badly hurt," Viper taunted him.

"You're right, I'm not that badly hurt," Lee admitted, rising to his feet in a combat stance. "Come on!"

Crimson Viper gritted her teeth and clanged her knuckles together for a massive electrical charge. The arc of lightning coming off her fists as she sped toward Lee was so visible it was almost blinding, but Lee seemed completely unfazed by it. Then Crimson Viper struck with an electrically charged blow even more powerful than her previous . . . and the electricity danced around Lee's Alloyed body, as the parallel slits that served as his visor _glowed._

Viper barely had time to widen her eyes with shock at what she was seeing before Lee struck back with a roundhouse kick that knocked her back some ways before she hit the ground. "Good spar," Lee said tersely but amiably, "but you were holding back."

"Wasn't a real fight," Crimson Viper amended as she rose to her feet. "If it were, you wouldn't be talking so calmly right now."

"I'll admit, I'd be a little more pressed for breath if it were," Lee said. "But you're good . . . damn good."

"So are you," Crimson Viper admitted. "You mind coming over some time to see if we can try incorporating some of your Alloy into our own suits?"

"If you don't mind having your systems permanently corrupted by the alien viral code the Alloy will use to protect itself from being exploited by someone else," Lee replied, his voice both snarky and wary. "Back in my world, governments have a very bad habit of trying to turn any useful technology they find into a weapon of some kind or other, even going so far as to try to use it to weaponize _people,_ turn them into super-soldiers. Pretty much every time that's happened, it's just come out as another super-villain to be put down by superheroes like the Avengers or the X-Men or the Fantastic Four or Spider-Man. It's how we ended up with a brilliant scientist recurrently turning into a green-skinned rampaging monster called the Hulk. He was trying to make a gamma bomb for the military and he got caught in the blast trying to save a kid who'd wandered onto the test site."

"And that didn't kill him?" Viper asked, raising an eyebrow.

"He had a mutagenic factor in his biochemistry that assimilated the gamma radiation somehow and transformed him into the Hulk," Lee explained. "It hasn't been the most pleasant experience for him over these years, to say the least."

"And you say there are others like him?" Chris mentioned.

"Not quite, but like I said, governments in my world look at things like the Alloy and they don't see something that could benefit humanity at large, they see a weapon they can wield against their enemies real or perceived or in service to their own agendas," Lee clarified. "It's that mindset that keeps a lot of the brighter minds in our little community of super-powered do-gooders from putting their stuff on the market, the reality that it will at some point be turned into a weapon or used for causes that they don't morally agree with."

"So no go on the Alloy?" Viper deduced.

Lee looked her dead in the eye. "No go. The Alloy stays with me. It's what we both want."

"Forgot, it's got a mind, too," Viper remarked dryly.

"It does," Lee confirmed with a smile. "We're good to each other, and for each other, and that's how it'll stay."

"A boy and his dog," Guile remarked. "Or a boy and his suit of bio-armor."

Lee chuckled. "Nice one, Guile." He turned back to Crimson Viper. "Speaking of armor, if that's your suit, you'd fit in very well back in my world."

"Yeah, you guys have a real penchant for flashy costumes," Crimson Viper jibed. "Anyway, this is a test platform for an upgrade to the suit I already use. Looks like your everyday business suit, but it has many of the same functions as what I'm wearing now."

"So I'm guessing what you're wearing now is just more specifically adapted for combat, whereas the other one enables you to go out in public without being noticed," Lee deduced.

"Or causing a scene like you and your super-friends," Viper mocked, though her eyes were surprisingly friendly.

"Speaking of causing a scene, that was some spar you had," Cammy remarked.

"And to think that was you when the Alloy's not at full power," Chun-Li added.

Lee chuckled sheepishly. "Yeah, thanks to Viper's electrical gloves, the Alloy's bio-circuitry got an extra charge and it'll be at full power sooner than I was expecting."

"That's a good thing, if you're gonna be up against Wesker and Bison in the future," Leon commented.

Lee scowled at the mention of Wesker and Bison, remembering what Jill and Chun-Li had told him about their reasons for their antagonism toward those two men. "Anytime, anyplace."

"Whoa, kid, you look like you're ready to go to war," Guile observed.

"I am," Lee replied honestly, his eyes cold with fury. "Wesker used, manipulated, and betrayed people who put their faith and trust in him, all in the name of turning himself into some kind of perverse god. Bison's no different. They're both going down if I have anything to say about it."

Chris smiled slightly, as did Cammy. "You must care about them a lot, to be as angry as you are about those two," Chris observed.

"Welcome aboard," Cammy remarked, her slight smile turning into a challenging smirk.

* * *

><p>After that bit of conversation, Lee was in the shower washing off the detritus of the spar between him and Crimson Viper. The Alloy could have easily taken care of that for him, but he liked showers. They had quite the psychologically cleansing effect, and there was nothing like warm water cascading on one's skin. Quickly finishing up, he dried himself off and headed into his room to redress himself.<p>

"Hey," he heard Chris's voice.

"Hi, Chris," Lee greeted him, almost finished dressing. "Come to give me the 'if you ever do anything to hurt her, I'll kill you' speech?"

"We would," Guile remarked, "but that'd be an insult."

"Why, because you're so sure I _wouldn't_ hurt them?" Lee wondered.

"No, because Chun-Li would kick your ass herself if you did anything she didn't like," Guile rejoined with a smirk.

"Same for Jill," Chris added. "Believe me, she can throw a punch."

Lee chuckled. "Speaking from experience?"

"Yeah," Chris admitted. "For your sake, be careful with them. Or it's not gonna be me and Guile you have to worry about." Then Guile and Chris left Lee's room, leaving him with his bemused thoughts. When he finally came out, he passed by Cammy, who looked quite amused.

"They gave you the speech, didn't they?" she surmised.

"It was actually more of a 'we don't need to do anything, because if you do anything, they'll take care of you themselves' speech," Lee confessed.

Cammy chuckled. "They'd be right. You're a sweet boy, Lee. You'll make someone very happy, hopefully the same someone I'm hoping to see very happy."

Lee smiled warmly. "You're a good friend, Cammy, you know that?"

Cammy let out a delighted giggle. "Are you always this charming with women?" When Lee shrugged, she just smiled at him. "You'd better hurry. They're waiting for you."

"Sure, where?" Lee wondered.

* * *

><p>Somewhat earlier, Jill and Chun-Li had met face to face, both women rather somber and serious. "We have the same thing on our minds," Jill said, breaking the silence. "Or rather, the same person."<p>

"Lee?" Chun-Li deduced.

"Yeah," Jill replied. "I can see it whenever you look at him, and I'm sure you can see it whenever I look at him. We're both . . ."

"We're both drawn to him," Chun-Li finished. "It's not too hard to see why."

"He got his power by accident," Jill said, "and he still used it to protect people, just because it was the right thing to do. He sacrificed so much of himself, even, just to save everyone he could . . . He's a good man, no matter how young he is."

"That is the problem, though," Chun-Li admitted. "How young he is. I understand in some places, that wouldn't be so much of a problem, but here . . ."

"Yeah," Jill agreed. "But it's him . . . and somehow, I think he feels the same way about us that we do about him."

"Then why hasn't he said anything?" Chun-Li wondered.

"Men are terrible at admitting their feelings," Jill replied. "And well, if it really is both of us he has feelings for, he might be too scared of pitting us against each other to say anything. Would be just like him."

Chun-Li let out a soft chuckle. "If he did feel the same way about us as we do him . . . how would we solve that?"

"Ménage à trois?" Jill suggested sardonically.

"Share him?" Chun-Li concluded, a blush highlighting her features. "But how?"

"We'd have to ask him," Jill replied, trying her best not to stammer from how seriously Chun-Li had taken her jibe. Now that she thought about it, though, it had its benefits . . . namely that neither she nor Chun-Li would have to have their hearts broken or regret their "win," let alone leave Lee to feel guilty about breaking one of their hearts. "See how he feels before we get too ahead of ourselves."

That was how Cammy had ended up talking to Lee about seeing Jill and Chun-Li, and how Lee had found them waiting for him, sitting with very contemplative expressions on their faces. "Cammy said you wanted to see me," he said, trying to break what he could see was an awkward silence.

"Yeah," Jill confirmed.

"You might want to sit down, Lee," Chun-Li added.

Lee looked around, trying to find a good spot to sit without seeming to reject either of them or inciting unnecessary jealousy. Finally, he split the difference by sitting between them, yet facing them. "All right."

"We've been talking, Jill and I," Chun-Li admitted. "And we realized that we both have feelings for you. Strong feelings. At the same time, we'd rather not damage our partnership by ending up competing for you to choose one of us."

"So what does that amount to?" Lee wondered. "Am I off-limits to you both, or vice versa?"

"Not quite," Jill corrected. "We were thinking of a more . . . radical solution."

The radical solution in question was demonstrated by Jill and Chun-Li both taking one of Lee's hands. "That kind of radical?" Lee wondered.

Chun-Li smiled at him, her eyes twinkling. "If you're up for it."

"With the both of you . . . I might take that chance," Lee replied. "I'm not sure where this is going to go, between the three of us . . . but I'm all right with finding out if you are."

"We wouldn't have gotten you to come see us if we weren't," Jill said.

Lee blushed slightly. "Point taken. I'm just not the best at this sort of thing."

"Nobody is," Jill replied, "but we want you . . . so that's our best." She smiled reassuringly at him.

Chun-Li squeezed Lee's hand reassuringly, to reinforce Jill's words. Lee smiled back at them both. "Yeah, we can definitely try."

* * *

><p>Endnotes: Not quite the end. There'll actually be four chapters in this, with the fourth developing their relationship more, bringing them into another confrontation with the united forces of Wesker and Bison – and even delivering a way back to the Marvel Universe for Lee?! All apologies to everyone who had to wait nine months for me to update this story, and it's not quite over yet, as the fourth chapter mentioned above will tell you. Is the lemon chapter still on? Yes, yes, it is, but it will be posted to a different site whose name I'd rather not speak for fear of it being blocked when I post this chapter. Thanks to everyone who's still reading and not yet so disgusted with my year of dereliction that they've just given up, and hang in there for the fourth chapter!<p> 


End file.
